Saturday, February 4, 2012

Book Review: Wired (now titled Torn)

And here is the final installment in Robin Wasserman's trilogy, whew, only took me a month and a half to read and then review all of them which I suppose isn't too bad. So there's not much more to say at this point to introduce the book, onto the review!

Wired (now titled Torn) by Robin Wasserman
As before, this is the UK paperback cover, the kind I have, and again I prefer it to both the old US cover and the new set of covers as well. It's not the greatest cover, I just think that it's really hard to pull off a rainbow color scheme well and this cover isn't doing it, but the lighting on the old US covers bugs me and I feel like the new covers are too non-indicative of the story. 
 
Summary: Lia is back living at home as repayment to her father for the events in the last book and things continue to get more and more dangerous for mechs. Despite her and Biomax's best efforts to change the public's mind there is more and more violence against mechs but then the unthinkable happens, the mechs actually begin to die and Lia and Jude, with a few unlikely allies, are in for their most dangerous fight yet.

The Good: I was happily surprised to see a theory I had thought of reading the first book confirmed, slightly different but it did provide a bit more backstory to the series. I also liked how Lia's sister, Zo, got more character development since she was overdue for it and there have been hints for the past two books that she's more than she appears, the same goes for their mother and Lia's tune-up expert.  

The Bad: This book confirmed a nagging feeling I had had for the past two books, this really should have been one, huge, book instead of a trilogy. None of the books have the right balance of thinking and action and there are large parts where nothing happens. Turning this into one book possibly isn't the best solution, even paring down the books it would make for a 600-800 tome, but I feel like the pacing would have worked better and would've made for a more satisfying story. That aside, I should have been it coming but I disliked the ending (it's the exact same trope I disliked way back in Brain Jack) since I'm not fond of those kinds of tropes and it just makes me roll my eyes and drags me out of the story.

Bit of a short review but really that's it, I feel like the story had some good parts but that this story shouldn't have been a trilogy and that really hurt it pacing wise overall. Would I have liked it more as a single book? I think so, I'd still have problems with some of the subplots (I couldn't bring them up since they started getting more spoilery than I like to in reviews, not that I have any trouble with spoilers in the comments below) but it would avoid one problem I had with the series as a whole, characters appearing one book but not being important until later and feeling rather static until they became important.